Trituberculata is an extinct group of animals existing in the fossil record from about 215 – 85 MYA. It contains the ancestors of
Placentalia
Placental mammals ( infraclass Placentalia ) are one of the three extant subdivisions of the class Mammalia, the other two being Monotremata and Marsupialia. Placentalia contains the vast majority of extant mammals, which are partly distinguish ...
and
Marsupialia
Marsupials are any members of the mammalian infraclass Marsupialia. All extant marsupials are endemic to Australasia, Wallacea and the Americas. A distinctive characteristic common to most of these species is that the young are carried in a ...
; all modern mammals except
Monotremata are descended from trituberculates. It is named for the three tubercles (cusps) of the molar teeth (not to be confused with
Triconodonta This category includes prehistoric mammals known only from fossil records. Articles placed directly in this category do not easily fall into one of the given subcategories.
{{Wikisourcecat, Prehistoric mammals
Extinct mammals
Mammals
M ...
).
The clade Trituberculata is not always regarded as a valid one, and it likely does not form a monophyletic group. Instead, some of them may be "true" basal mammals (although not always closest related to each other), while others (such as the symmetrodonts) may fall just outside the therian
crown group
In phylogenetics, the crown group or crown assemblage is a collection of species composed of the living representatives of the collection, the most recent common ancestor of the collection, and all descendants of the most recent common ancestor. ...
.
See also
*
Eutheria
Eutheria (; from Greek , 'good, right' and , 'beast'; ) is the clade consisting of all therian mammals that are more closely related to placentals than to marsupials.
Eutherians are distinguished from noneutherians by various phenotypic t ...
*
Multituberculata
Multituberculata (commonly known as multituberculates, named for the multiple tubercles of their teeth) is an extinct order of rodent-like mammals with a fossil record spanning over 130 million years. They first appeared in the Middle Jurassic, ...
References
Jurassic mammals
Cretaceous mammals
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